


With You On My Horizon

by treaddelicately



Series: Marvel Fluff Bingo [1]
Category: The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, Masturbation, Pen Pals, Pining, Post-The Punisher S1, not Defenders compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-06
Updated: 2021-02-06
Packaged: 2021-03-17 22:08:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29232789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/treaddelicately/pseuds/treaddelicately
Summary: After leaving Billy for dead at the carousel, Frank takes a road trip to get his head on straight, but it's hard to leave some things from New York behind. Or, well...someone.
Relationships: Frank Castle/Karen Page
Series: Marvel Fluff Bingo [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2146551
Comments: 14
Kudos: 64





	With You On My Horizon

**Author's Note:**

> Sweetly beta'd by the light of my life and constant enabler, @myracingthoughts. Couldn't have done this one without you, Nat.
> 
> This fic was written as part of the Marvel Fluff Bingo and fits with my square **B5: pen pals**.

The urge struck while Frank waited in line at a gas station. 

One of the racks by the counter was stacked full of postcards. Wobbly on one leg, too, and creaky when he spun it around to get a better look. He thought about it while the old lady in front of him picked out her lotto tickets, thumbing through a few black-and-white ones with the city name on them.

Near the bottom of the rack, he found one with just a photo of a local lake on the front. Something quiet and peaceful. The city and state were still written underneath in white block letters, but that didn’t seem like such a bad thing. He’d be long gone by the time it got to its destination anyhow.

Mind made up, Frank tossed it up on the counter with his styrofoam cup of coffee and a bag of jerky.

The first pen he tried didn’t even work, and the second only kicked in after he scribbled circles up in the top corner of the card for a while. His handwriting was shit, too, and bumpy from using the steering wheel as a surface, but he doubted she’d care either way.

_Clear skies over here. Hope the weather’s good your way.  
Pete_

He slipped it into a box outside the post office and then found the nearest on-ramp for the interstate.

There was no real reason for the check-in. It would be a lie to call it anything but selfish, really. Everyone was better off if Karen had no clue where he was or what he was doing, and god fuckin’ knew she was leagues better off without him weaseling his way into her life. 

Because she had one of those. A life.

A good one, too, with that fancy new job at the paper and her friends, and Matt Murdock. She didn’t need him hangin’ around, getting in her business and muckin’ everything up. Dragging her down into his bullshit.

Karen Page was better off without him, just like everybody else.

So he didn’t need to check in with her, to let her know how he was doing, except this little nagging voice in the back of his head that told him she’d worry if he didn’t. And he knew Karen, knew she did dumb shit when she worried, when she got a bug up her ass about something and wouldn’t let it go.

Better to reassure her this way, from a distance. They could both move on with their lives and that would be that.

* * *

Moving on, of course, was bullshit.

Frank wasn’t the type to move on. He couldn’t forgive or forget, had made his entire new life about the things he couldn’t let go of. Everyone who’d had a part in ripping his family away was either dead or rotting where they belonged, and it would still never be enough.

There was no moving on, so all he could do was just move forward. Across the country at a leisurely pace, taking his time the hell away from New York for a while. The more distance he put between himself and that city, the fuckin’ better.

Frank had plenty of money, the government saw to that, so that wasn’t an issue. Hell, even being alone wasn’t really an issue. He never minded being on his own. Preferred it, really, especially after months holed up listening to Lieberman’s bullshit.

He made it all the way to Ohio before the restlessness kicked in. 

The waking hours were perfectly fine. He moseyed around and spent his time on the road or in dive bars, happy to grab a drink and listen to some shitty music here and there. Even the nights weren’t so bad, since the nightmares and half-dreams left him alone, for the most part. No more dreaming about blood spattered on the walls, or Maria’s hand on his face. 

No, the nights would have been fine if he could have gotten some fucking sleep. Every night he closed his eyes, tossed and turned on scratchy sheets and creaky beds while his bones vibrated with need.

A need for _what_ , was what he couldn’t quite suss out.

He read to break up the time, piles of paperbacks he collected from secondhand stores on his way. He had a few favorites that he kept stashed in his duffel instead of the van and they got him through most of the hours when he wanted to crawl out of his skin.

Still, there were only so many times he could read _No Country for Old Men_. The third night in a row waking up just past 1 AM sent him reaching past the book on the nightstand to switch the lamp on. Sweaty and a little irritated, Frank grabbed the little notebook he kept stashed in his duffel bag and balanced it on his knee.

Putting the pen to paper was easy. Like each word dragged a little more tension out of him.

_Haven’t heard about any catastrophes, so you must be keeping quiet. Almost too quiet over here. Sometimes the silence just creeps inside you, you know? Think you called it ‘echoing’ once. That’s how it feels. Bouncing off the walls and coming back at me most days._

_Anyway, I’m alive. Guess that’s all any of us can ask for.  
Pete_

* * *

An _after_ , she’d said. An after for him.

Frank tried to find his after for a little while. He still spent a lot of time in bars, drinking shitty beer and listening to shittier music, but when that didn’t take the edge off, he went for another course of action.

He went to the movies alone. A lot, actually. Saw a shit ton of films he hated and a few that made him chuckle around a mouthful of popcorn. 

He walked, too. There were plenty of parks to choose from in the Midwest, endless nature trails where he wore his boots down to their soles. At first it was peaceful, but the quiet was a different breed from the city noise he’d gotten used to again. The ambient sounds weren’t gone, just different. 

They stuck in his head, reminding him too much of being at war, alone outside with nothing but the buzzards for company. 

He kept to the small-town streets and diners after that.

One morning, while waiting for his eggs and toast and a refill on his coffee, Frank pulled a pen from his bag and turned over the paper menu on the table.

 _Karen_ , he wrote on the back.

There wasn’t much to tell, but he told her anyway. First that he was safe, like he always did. Always had to start with that so she wouldn’t worry, the way he knew she did. After that, it was just a long ramble about the things he’d seen, the places he’d been, the crappy food and how he’d love nothing more than a home-cooked meal for once.

Frank crumpled the paper up in his hand when he finished

What the hell did she care about what he’d been _eating_ , for Christ’s sake?

Who said Karen Page gave a single shit about him? 

Maybe she was throwing all of his mail away, unopened. Tryin’ to get on with her life the way she’d told him to do. Forgetting about Frank Castle the way everyone else was. The way she deserved to.

Fists clenched together, Frank rested his forehead on his knuckles and closed his eyes.

Karen, who defended him when no one else did. When everyone had cast him off as a psychopath, a vet with a case of the crazies, she’d come along with her own set of guns blazing to defend him. Even when it didn’t suit her, when it would have been more convenient to look the other way.

 _”Believe it or not, I actually care about what happens to you,”_ she’d said.

Frank opened his eyes and smoothed out the menu. He folded it carefully, tucked it into one of the envelopes from his bag, and addressed it to her apartment.

If he’d learned anything at all about Karen Page, it was that she was more than capable of making her own decisions. If she wanted to throw his letters in the trash, then so be it.

He was just selfish enough to hope that she wouldn’t.

* * *

After months, maybe years, without touching himself, Frank was struck dumb when the impulse hit out of nowhere.

Sure, he’d woken up with a hard-on. Plenty of times. Those were just easy to ignore, generally shaken off by an uncomfortable piss and a cup of coffee to wilt away whatever the nightmares hadn’t taken care of on their own.

Nah, morning wood was easy. It was the blood rushing south in the fuckin’ shower, of all places, that made things more difficult.

His showers were usually a five-minute affair, enough to wash his hair and his ass and be done with it, especially in all the shitty motels he’d been staying in. But the water pressure in this one was more than decent and hit between his shoulder blades just right, working out a tense knot that had been a pain in the ass for weeks.

When the knot eased and Frank relaxed, that was when the image sprung forward. Fully formed in his mind, like it’d been laying in wait for an opportunity.

The warm weight of a woman straddling his back, slender thighs pressing into his sides, strong, nimble fingers massaging the tension out of his shoulders. So real, so goddamn visceral, that it made Frank groan out loud. 

For the first time in a long time, as long as he cared to remember, it wasn’t Maria.

Instead, Karen’s voice sounded in his ear. “You like that, Frank?”

His brain and his body found themselves at odds for several moments. The guilt that dropped his stomach like a stone to his feet, compounded with the pure, unparalleled lust surging up inside him for the first since time he couldn’t even remember when. Frank stood under the spray, grappling with the reality of fantasizing about somebody else, somebody different, but in the end it didn’t matter.

 _An after_ , she’d said.

Frank wrapped a hand around his cock, only mildly surprised to find himself rock hard. Almost painfully so, especially when he thumbed over the head experimentally. He let out a shuddering breath and closed his eyes.

“It’s okay, Frank,” Karen coos in his ear. “I’ve got you. It’s okay.”

And fuck, if that didn’t have him firin’ on all cylinders, but his mind didn’t have it quite right. Karen wasn’t so soft and complacent.

The Karen he knew, the Karen he wanted, wouldn’t coo sweet nothings in his ear. Frank adjusted his grip and breathed in again, shuffling things around in his head.

It was easier when he thought about her touching him. Karen’s soft lips pressing to his chest, just over his heart. A curtain of long, blonde hair hiding her from view as she made her way down his body. Her hand circling around him and taking over what he couldn’t finish on his own, squeezing and stroking and bringing him closer with each twist of her wrist…

The Karen he knew was strong and insistent, urging him on.

“Frank, look at me,” she commands.

His eyes had never been shut tighter, but he stared right in her baby blues, wide and unfocused and a little dark because she wants him, too. His hand—Karen’s hand—sped up and he gasped, every muscle in his body tensing in anticipation of the heat unfurling in his stomach. 

Karen’s teeth release her bottom lip, giving him a flash of that pretty smile before her lips crush against his.

The roaring in Frank’s ears subsided as the world came back to him piece by piece. He flexed his fingers and splashed some water into the corner of the tub to clean up the mess he’d made, and finished his shower. Once he was finished and dressed he laid in bed for a long time, just trying to get his heart rate back under control.

After that, all he wanted was to hear her voice.

* * *

Frank spent three more weeks talking himself in and out of it.

He wrote the letter four times, each paragraph more messy than the last, crossed-out lines and smudges where he’d rub his hand across the paper and smear the ink before it had time to dry. There were a thousand things he wanted to say, but none that didn’t sound sappy and dramatic and dumb as fuck.

In the end, he scrawled a single line.

_Just wanna make sure you’re safe._

Underneath, he wrote out the number to his burner. He pressed the tiny slip of paper between the funny pages of the paper and mailed it off the next day.

In the meantime, he drove. Without ever really thinking about it, he’d ended up heading back towards New York. He chalked it up to too much time with the dense forests of the Midwest and a need to see some actual cities outside of the single night he’d spent outside of Detroit. Lyin’ to himself, maybe, but if he stopped to think too hard about it, he might never make it back at all.

The van needed an oil change near Scranton, so Frank bought the supplies himself and jacked it up in a park-and-ride lot. While he was greased to his elbows with his back flat on the pavement, his phone rang.

Fuckin’ naturally. Wasn’t like they could ever get the timing right.

Still, Frank managed to get himself out from under the van before the fifth buzz in his pocket. He was still climbing to his feet when he flipped it open with an oil-slick hand.

“’Lo?”

Karen breathed into the phone on the other end, like she was relieved. 

“Hi,” she said.

“Kinda in the middle of something,” he told her, as apologetically as he could. “Can I call ya back?”

“Are you actually going to call?”

Frank huffed out something near a laugh. “Would I lie to ya?”

“No,” she said, without a hint of hesitation, locking a vise around his chest. The trust, the faith that she put in him, was never something he felt like he deserved. “Call. I’ll wait up.”

Frank didn’t keep her waiting long. He finished up the oil change and dragged himself to the first motel off the freeway with a flickering vacancy sign. The shower there was objectively awful, with creaky pipes and lukewarm water at best, but it got the grease off his forearms and the sweat out of his hair. 

He collapsed on the bed and flicked his phone open less than two hours after Karen’s first call. She answered on the second ring.

“It’s late,” he greeted roughly.

Karen’s warm smile was hundreds of miles away, but he could feel it in every word. “I told you I’d wait up.” 

He could see her in his mind, the shrug, her holding the phone in the cradle of her shoulder while she carried something through her apartment. Vaguely, he caught a clinking sound and then running water. Dishes, he realized.

“What time’d you get home from the office?”

“Late,” Karen replied. She never lied to him, either. “I was still there, before.”

He frowned. “You shouldn’t have—”

“No, no, I know,” she apologized before he could finish. “I just, I didn’t look at my mail until I got there, and when I saw your letter, I just…”

She didn’t say the rest. She didn’t have to. Frank tucked an arm behind his head to distract himself from the rolling in his gut, imagining her tapping her foot impatiently all day for a chance to call. That she’d wanted to contact him badly enough to chance it in her office.

Stupid, and fuckin’ reckless, and so Karen that it made him want to laugh.

“No harm, no foul.” He cleared his throat. “It’s, uh…s’good to hear your voice.”

“Yeah,” Karen breathed, and he could hear the water shut off in the background. “Yeah, you too.”

A silence stretched between them while occurred to Frank that he hadn’t actually thought of anything to talk _about_. He’d spent weeks thinking of Karen’s voice but never thought too much about what she would say.

“So how can I help?”

If he wasn’t already laying down, he’d have been knocked flat. “Help with what?”

Amusement crept into Karen’s tone. “Well, I assumed you were going to tell me.”

“You think I need you for something?”

Even as he said it, Frank knew the answer. Why wouldn’t she think that? When had he ever talked to Karen without needing something from her?

Selfish bastard. He didn’t deserve any of the seconds she spent on him, not a breath she wasted in his direction. And even after everything, she was still a better damn person that he’d ever be. After all, she thought he needed somethin’ and she called anyway. 

“I don’t know,” she said. “Do you?”

“Not this time,” he replied, his throat tight. “Just… just wanted to talk.”

“Oh.” The surprise in her tone clenched the vise tighter in his chest, sent the guilt echoing from the top of his skull to the tips of his toes. “Okay, then.”

Frank cleared his throat. “What’d you do today?”

It was a pitiful way to start a conversation, but Karen indulged him. She told him about her boss at the Bulletin riding her ass about her latest story, a deadline she had to make by tomorrow night. She told him about Nelson and how he’d turned into a hotshot, and how she was planning on visiting his swanky new apartment for a dinner with him and his girlfriend over the weekend.

She talked about Murdock, too. What a fuckin’ idiot he was being, and how she and Nelson had tried to snap him out of it.

“He thinks if he hides himself away, everyone will stop caring, but that’s not how it works. He’s so damn stubborn, I just want to…”

“Shake him?” Frank supplied, his lips curving in a half-smile when she laughed.

“I was gonna say kill him,” Karen giggled. “But you’re right, shake him sounds a lot better.”

She made him talk, too. About all the things he’d seen on the road, everything he’d put in his letters and more, and she even prodded out of him that all he wanted was some damn authentic Italian food one of these days. It was easier to keep her going, though, to let her ramble on while he laid back on the pillows and let himself sink into her life from a distance.

After a while, Frank found himself falling asleep to the sound of her voice.

“Can I ask you a question?” she asked, and he rumbled an affirmative. “Why’d you write me those letters?”

As if he hadn’t mulled that one over himself every single day since he’d sent the first one. Frank rubbed a hand over his face, his voice a little rough with exhaustion when he answered.

“I guess I jus’ wanted you to know I was alright.”

Karen went quiet, too. “And are you?”

Everything between them stretched out like a river Frank couldn’t, or maybe didn’t want to cross. Schoonover and Rawlins and Russo, the trial he’d botched, Murdock and his mask, and a lingering look in an elevator. Things that had compounded inside him for months and simmered without any chance of ever settling.

“Yeah, sweetheart. I’m alright.”

He listened to her breathe, unsure if she couldn’t think of anything else to say or if she just didn’t believe him. He wouldn’t have blamed her either way. What he wasn’t expecting was the question that tumbled out of her next, without preamble or a chance for him to prep an answer.

“When are you coming home?”

 _Home_. 

The way she said it, so matter of fact, like he had one of those anymore. Like weaker men with guns hadn’t taken his home away from him when he’d least expected it. Like he hadn’t doused it in gasoline himself and burned it to the ground. Home was gone, dead and buried, and there was no getting it back.

He could have told her that.

Instead, he closed his eyes and thought of her eyes boring into him. Her hands, gripping his shoulders and holding him steady when he thought he couldn’t take another step. He thought of Lieberman and Sarah, that asshole son of theirs and little Leo. The only friends, the only peace he’d known in a hell of a long time.

It would never be the same, but it could be something. If he’d let it.

It could be an after. 

“Soon,” he told her. “I’ll be home soon.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! Kudos and comments are appreciated and cherished. If you'd like to see more of my nonsense, you can find me on [tumblr](treaddelicately.tumblr.com).


End file.
